another valentine

To Plath, to Sexton

So what use was poetry
to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
in by the fire.

And when your tree
crashed through your house,

what use then
was all your power?

It was the use of you.
It was the flower.

-- Jean Valentine, The River at Wolf

difficult loves

The boy swung the muzzle of the gun around again.  It was strange, thinking it over, to be so surrounded by air, separated from other things by yards of air.  When he aimed the gun, on the other hand, the air was a straight invisible line drawn tight from the mouth of the rifle to the target, to the hawk flying up there in the sky with wings that did not seem to move.  When he pressed the trigger, the air was still as empty and transparent as before, but up there, at the other end of the line, the hawk was folding its wings and dropping like a stone.  From the open bolt floated the good smell of gunpowder.

                                                                       -- Italo Calvino, "The Crow Comes Last"

from Austerlitz

(just one of so many brilliant, quotable, single-sentence passages...)

"The frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest."

— W. G. Sebald     

via lattea

Via Lattea 

by Jessica Abel 

(ca. 1995, and greatly diminished without her illustrations)

Do you know what the Milky Way is?

The galaxy is a great spinning disk, and we are inside the disc, and the Milky Way is what it looks like from the inside, edge on.

Some people look up and feel insignificant.  I choose to look up and feel a part of something huge.

Do you ever feel, in the summer, a night like a balm, like a kiss, like a soft velvet cape about your shoulders? 

A night that feels like nothing can be bad?  

A night that, despite its softness, feels like an adrenaline shot in your veins?

A night that feels like it belongs to an alternate-universe-you who lives a much happier life?

It's some sort of alchemy of heat and dark and stagelights, or streetlights, or starlight, that turns the leaden night into gold, 
                  
... and makes your heart stand in your throat.  You have to be in it, now, because you can't save it.  

It is fleeting.

oh pioneers... (a poem).

            Massachusetts Winter

the first January in this place

was the worst.  i had been cold

before, i had been alone — but not for so many

days in a row.  if time does not “exist” then what

is this weight.  the difference between one snowflake

and ten, how it accumulates on the glass.

watching the wipers, back and forth on the windshield,

we sat unmoving, unable to exit 
the (relative) warmth of the car.

those pilgrims must’ve been fucking desperate, i said,

and you laughed.  a puff of breath.  whatever will 
left to speak was gone then.  breath turned 

to frost, like ash, it covered everything.

it was January when the wind started

blowing through the floorboards of my rented room

rattling the windowpanes.  under siege

sleep was getting hard despite the darkness:
constant.  shivering, the body refuses to surrender, 
afraid it will not wake again.  
so many days

in a row i drove to work in the dark and in the dark

drove home again.

the hours between rose and set in the window of an office

where i sat with pictures of people who died

and books in a dozen languages i do not speak. 

this was a job.  somebody has to do

the remembering, and i

was there.

living between the train tracks and the cemetery,

i remembered everything.  in wool socks on a mattress on the floor,

i heard the train cars rumble and squeal across the bridge

at night, whispering to my body,

i said, sleep

but there was no answer.

that was the year the exodus began. 

we met for one last drink, my friend and i,

the night before he moved to L.A.

it was such an obvious solution i was mad i hadn’t thought of it

first.  so i accused him of cheating — but what 

he said, is there to win? and ordered another round. 

every January now, someone else leaves.  there is a difference

between one and three and ten.

nothing to win is not the same as nothing to lose

when the job is remembering.

the beers fizzled gold in the yellow bar light.

dark wood worn smooth.  a gust from the open door.

i thought of a pile of shoes in a black-and-white photo.

passing over

it's springtime again, i'm going to massachusetts again.  no matter how beautiful it is, spring summer or fall, porch lights glowing in dusk, the sounds of the insects at night, seeing the view straight across from one hill top to the next—it will always be, to me, a place that i survived.  somehow i survived it.

and i'm sure the words of Jason Molina had some small part in that.  his voice, with its impossible clarifying pain.  it's hard to believe that he didn't survive whatever his massachusetts was.   


Almost Was Good Enough
          Songs: Ohia

It's been hard doing anything
winter stuck around so long
I kept trying anyhow and I'm still trying now
just to keep working just to keep working
I remember when it didn't use to be so hard
this used to be impossible
A new season has to begin
I can feel it leaning in whispering, Nothing's lonely now
Nothing anymore in pain
A tall shadow dressed how secrets always dress
when they want everyone to know that they're around
leaning in whispering, My friend over there
don't know what he's talking about
Did you really believe
that everyone makes it out?
Almost no one makes it out
I'm going to use that street to hide
from that human doubt
to hide from what was shining
and has finally burned us out
But if no one makes it out
How come you're talking to one right now
for once almost was good enough

new york city marble cemetery

birthday

 from Louise Glück, the Seven Ages

Amazingly, I can look back
fifty years.  And there, at the end of the gaze,
a human being already entirely recognizable,
the hands clutched in the lap, the eyes
staring into the future with the combined
terror and hopelessness of a soul expecting annihilation.

Entirely familiar, though still, of course, very young.
Staring blindly ahead, the expression of someone staring into utter darkness.
And thinking—which meant, I remember, the attempts of the mind
to prevent change.

Familiar, recognizable, but much more deeply alone, more despondent.
She does not, in her view, meet the definition
of child, a person with everything to look forward to.

This is how the others look; this is, therefore, what they are.
Constantly making friends
with the camera, many of them actually
smiling with real conviction—

I remember that age.  Riddled with self-doubt, self-loathing,
and at the same time suffused
with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever
consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future
completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will
but to fend it off—

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one's ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent
unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,
were actually innocence of the world.
Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutable—
all that the absolute excludes.  I sat in the dark, in the living room.
The birthday was over.  I was thinking, naturally, about time.
I remember how, in almost the same instant,
my heart would leap up exultant and collapse
in desolate anguish.  The leaping up—the half I didn't count—
that was happiness; that is what the word meant.